Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (56 page)

They tell me the letters I write to you and leave here at this memorial are waking others up to the fact that there is still much pain left, after all these years, from the Vietnam War.

This I know. I would rather have had you for twenty-one years, and all the pain that goes with losing you, than never to have had you at all.

Mom

Choose any film as the best movie ever made about Vietnam, and this is the other half of the same double feature. Francois Truffaut once wrote that it was impossible to make an "anti-war film," because any war film, no matter what its message, was sure to be exhilarating.

He did not live to see this film.

MAY 26, 1995

i eople who have been damaged by life can make the most amazing adjustments in order to survive and find peace. Sometimes it is a tossup whether to call them mad, or courageous. Consider the case of R. Crumb. He was the most famous comics artist of the 196os, whose images like "Keep on Truckin"' and "Fritz the Cat" and his cover for the Janis Joplin Cheap Thrills album helped to fix the visual look of the decade. He was also a person hanging onto sanity by his fingernails, and it is apparently true that his art saved his life.

Crumb, which is one of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made, tells the story of Robert Crumb, his brothers Max and Charles, and an American childhood which looks normal in the old family photographs but concealed deep wounds and secrets. It is the kind of film that you watch in disbelief, as layer after layer is peeled away and you begin to understand the strategies that have kept Crumb alive and made him successful, when one of his brothers became a recluse in an upstairs bedroom and the other passes his time quite literally sitting on a bed of nails.

Movies like this do not usually get made because the people who have lives like this usually are not willing to reveal them. Crumb was directed by Terry Zwigoff, who had two advantages: he had known Crumb well for many years, and he was himself so unhappy and suicidal during the making of the film that in a sense Crumb let him do it as a favor.

Of Crumb's importance and reputation there is not much doubt. His original illustrations and the first editions of his r96os and 19705 underground comic books command high prices. His new work is shown in galleries, and is in important collections. No less an authority than Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, appears in Crumb to declare him 19 the Brueghel of the last half of the twentieth century."

But Crumb is not really about the art, although it will cause you to look at his familiar images with a new eye. It is about the artist, who grew up in a dysfunctional family led by a father who was an overbearing tyranta depressive, sadistic bully who, according to this film, beat his sons and lost few opportunities to demean them. (There were also two sisters, who declined to participate in the film.)

All three brothers retreated into fantasies in an attempt to cope with their home life. It was Charles, the oldest, who first started to draw comic strips, and then Robert began to copy him. The brothers seem to have had strong fantasy relationships with comic characters; Charles began to pretend he was Long John Silver. And while it is one thing to learn that Robert masturbated while looking at comics, especially his own, it is another to learn that his prime erotic fixation was with Bugs Bunny.

Many of the people in Crumb's life talk with great frankness about him, including his brothers, his mother, his first wife, Dana (who says he began to develop a "new vision" in 1966 after experimenting with drugs) and his present wife, Aline Kominsky, who recounts bizarre details of his lifestyle with acceptance and understanding. We learn most from Robert himself, however.

He was intensely unhappy in high school, nursed deep grudges against his contemporaries, and uses high school enemies as the models for many of the unattractive caricatures in his work. It is surprising to learn how closely autobiographical some of his drawings are; in his comics men are fixated by callipygian women, and dream of riding them piggyback, and then we see Robert doing the same thing at a gallery opening. He pages through the faces in a high school yearbook, and then we see their lookalikes in his cartoons.

If Robert was unhappy in high school, Charles found it an ordeal from which he never really recovered. In a visit to the family home, occupied by Charles and his mother, we visit the upstairs room that he rarely left, and with Robert essentially acting as the interviewer, he remembers, "I was good-looking, but there was something wrong with my personality; I was the most unpopular kid in school." On a visit to Max, we find him living as a monk, drawing a long linen tape through his body to clean his intestines, and showing recent oil paintings of considerable skill (he still has his mail-order test from the Famous Artists School).

Mrs. Crumb, interviewed while sprawled on a sofa and worrying darkly about the window shades, seems complacent about the fact that Charles never leaves the house: "At least he's not out taking illegal drugs or making some woman miserable."

Zwigoff shows us details of many Crumb comic strips which are intensely violent, sadistic, and hateful toward women. And he interviews such voices of sanity as Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones, who finds his work pornographic-"an arrested juvenile vision." So it is, and her voice expresses not puritanism but concern and simple observation. Yet as I left the film I felt that if anyone had earned the right to express Crumb's vision, it was Crumb, since his art is so clearly a coping mechanism that has allowed him to survive and deal with his pain. Crumb is a film that gives new meaning to the notion of art as therapy.

MAY 3, 1996

Eventually we'll never know each other. Probably very soon.

-Heidi Fleiss on Ivan Nagy

h, the face of evil can be charming. Remember Hannibal Lecter. Or consider, in the real world, the case of Ivan Nagy. He is a sometime Hollywood movie director who was also-if you can believe his detractors-a pimp, a drug dealer, and a police informer who betrayed his lover while still sleeping with her. He has an impish little smile that he allows to play around his face, and it implicates you in his sleaze. Come on, the smile suggests, who are we kidding? We're all men of the world here; we know this stuff goes on.

Ivan Nagy was a key player in the life of Heidi Fleiss, the "Hollywood Madam," who was sentenced to three years for procuring prostitutes for an A-list of top Hollywood players and free-spending Arabs. Heidi was not an innocent when she met Nagy. At sixteen, she was already the lover of the millionaire financial swindler Bernie Cornfield. But it was Nagy who (according to the legendary Madam Alex) "sold" Heidi to Alex for $Soo, then used her as a mole to take over Alex's thriving call girl operation. And it was Nagy who eventually turned Heidi over to the policeagain, if Madam Alex can be believed.

What is intriguing about Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam is that no one can necessarily be believed. This is an endlessly suggestive, tantalizing documentary, in which the young life of Heidi Fleiss is reflected back at us from funhouse mirrors: now she is a clever businesswoman, now a dupe, now a cynical hooker, now an innocent wrapped around the little finger of a manipulative hustler. Watching the film, we hear several versions of the same stories. Someone is lying, yes-but is anyone telling the truth?

Nick Broomfield is an enterprising documentary filmmaker for the BBC, who tracks his prey with a lightweight camera and sound equipment that can hear around corners. This film is the record of his six months on the case of Heidi Fleiss. She might seem like an insignificant, even pathetic figure, but by the time Broomfield is finished, she has become a victim, and almost sympathetic, if only in contrast with the creatures she dealt with. She wanted to be bad, but had absolutely no idea what she was getting into. "As much bravado as she displays, to me she's still a little kid," her mother tells Broomfield.

Her mother participated in this documentary? Most certainly. And so did Heidi, and Nagy, and Victoria Sellers (Peter's daughter and Heidi's best friend), and Madam Alex, and former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates. They participated because Broomfield paid them to talk. Madam Alex counts out her cash carefully, and we see Gates pocketing $2,5oo before submitting to Broomfield's questions.

What we learn is that Alex was for many years the most successful madam in Los Angeles. Arrested for tax evasion, she got off with probation after an LAPD detective testified that she was a valuable police informant. She allegedly used Nagy, a filmmaker with a respectable front, to obtain airline tickets for her, since she couldn't get a credit card. Perhaps he also located cocaine for her clients. She says Nagy "sold" her Heidi, at around the age of twenty, and that Heidi helped Nagy steal away her empire. Heidi was the front, but Nagy was always the power and the brains.

Nagy says Madam Alex was "one of the most evil women I've met in my life." He smiles. He asks Broomfield, "Do I look like I need $Soo?" Then he sells him a home video of himself and Heidi. In the video, he tries to get her to take off her clothes, and she observes with concern but not alarm that "some green stuff" is coming out of that part of a man's anatomy he least desires to produce green stuff. A man who would sell that video needs $Soo.

Broomfield finds Mike Brambles, an LAPD detective (now in jail for robbery), who says Heidi's problem was that she was a bad police informant. She didn't cooperate, and so Nagy set her up to take the fall. Heidi doesn't seem to know if this is true. She describes her business (her clients wanted "typical untouched Southern California eighteen-year-old girls next door. No high heels. Blondes, blondes, blondes"). She is realistic ("A lot of times they'd hire us just to watch them do drugs"). She confesses to always having been attracted to older men ("Over forty, they're all the right age to me").

There is talk of a shadowy Israeli named Cookie, who everyone in the film seems frightened of. If Nagy is the power behind Heidi, is Cookie behind everything? No one will say. Broomfield is tireless in poking his nose, and camera, into these lives. During one visit to Alex he finds her maid using incense to purify the apartment against evil spirits. Nagy conducts a tour of his art collection. Heidi is interviewed in front of her bookshelf, which contains a set of the Great Books of the Western World: did she buy them, or did a client trade them in?